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Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors
Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors
Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors
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Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors

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Photography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself.

For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographers—including Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenko—used text to shape the reception of their visual work. From the diary to print, the literary word imbues that photographic moment with a personal life story, and frames and reframes it in the writing of history. In this primer on photographic literacy, Reischl argues for the central place that photography has played in the formation of the Russian literary imagination over the course of roughly seventy years. From image to text and back again, she traces the visual consciousness of modern Russian literature as captured through the lens of the Russian author-photographer.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 15, 2018
ISBN9781501730498
Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors

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    Photographic Literacy - Katherine M. H. Reischl

    PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERACY

    CAMERAS IN THE HANDS OF RUSSIAN AUTHORS

    Katherine M. H. Reischl

    Cornell University Press

    Ithaca and London

    FOR JONATHAN AND MARGARET

    CONTENTS

    List of Illustrations

    Acknowledgments

    Note on Transliteration and Translation

    Introduction: Chasing Pushkin’s Photograph

    1. Tolstoy in the Age of His Technological Reproducibility

    2. The Diffusion of Domesticated Photography

    3. Microgeography, Macroworld

    4. Look Left, Young Man! The International Exchange of Photo-Narratives

    Conclusion: Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship

    Notes

    Index

    Color plates at end of e-book

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    0.1. Pushkin, a beard fragment

    0.2. Double of A. S. Pushkin, Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912)

    0.3. Overexposed Pushkin

    0.4. Alexander Rodchenko, cover for Zhurnalist, no. 3 (1930)

    1.1. Sergei Levitsky, portrait of Alexander Herzen (1861)

    1.2. Sergei Levitsky, portrait of Herzen versus Herzen (1865)

    1.3. Andrei Karelin, family in a living room, from his Artistic Album of Photography from Nature (ca. 1880s)

    1.4. Dzhigets. On the Eastern Shore of the Black Sea from The Album of Photographic Portraits of the August Persons and Figures Known in Russia (1865)

    1.5. Sergei Levitsky, Lev Tolstoy (1856)

    1.6. Anonymous portrait of Lev Tolstoy from a daguerreotype (1854)

    1.7. Lev Tolstoy, self-portrait at Yasnaya Polyana with autograph, I took this myself (1862)

    1.8. Sophia Tolstoy, self-portrait with a photo-portrait of the deceased Vanechka (1895)

    1.9. Sophia Tolstoy, Last Wedding Anniversary, 23 September 1910

    2.1. William H. Rau, Pompeian Room in the Imperial Winter Palace (1903)

    2.2. Postcard portrait of Leonid Andreev (ca. 1910s)

    2.3. Leonid Andreev’s scrapbook from Vadim’s infancy (1903–4)

    2.4. Cover and interior page from Leonid Andreev’s scrapbook (1909)

    2.5. Title page of Leonid Andreev’s first Collected Works (1909)

    2.6. Andreyev with a fanciful drawing by the author, at the right, New York Times (1909)

    2.7. Leonid Andreev (from the latest photographs), Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911)

    2.8. Leonid Andreev, L. ANDREEV—AMATEURPHOTOGRAPHER; the son of Leonid Andreev—Vadim: photo taken by his father, Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911)

    2.9. Vadim Andreev, diary fragment with portraits (ca. 1920)

    2.10. Mother from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913)

    2.11. The author’s children from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913)

    2.12. Maximilian Voloshin, fragments from the notebook for Story of My Soul (ca. 1904)

    2.13. Maximilian Voloshin, untitled photograph with self-portrait and Elena Kruglikova in the artist’s studio (ca. 1905)

    2.14. Maximilian Voloshin with Taiakh, Koktebel (1911)

    2.15. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait in window (ca. 1910s)

    2.16. Last Pages of L. N. Andreev’s Diary (1921)

    3.1. Cover and illustrations for Mikhail Prishvin’s In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907)

    3.2. Vyg-Lake, In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907)

    3.3. Mikhail Prishvin, Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Open and Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Closed, In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1934)

    3.4. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, plate 692 (1887)

    3.5. Mikhail Prishvin, Povenets. The Start of the Canal (1934)

    3.6. Vladimir Griuntal and G. Iablonovsky, What Is This? (1932)

    3.7. Eleazar Langman, Youth Commune ‘Dinamo’ Factory, Proletarskoe foto no. 1 (1930)

    3.8. G. Sashalski, Mountain Sheep, USSR in Construction (1935)

    3.9. N. Shekutyev, Fur Processing, USSR in Construction (1935)

    3.10. Vladimir Favorsky, frontispiece for Mikhail Prishvin’s Ginseng (1934)

    3.11. Mikhail Prishvin, Spotted Deer, Golden Horn (1933)

    3.12. Mikhail Prishvin, photo proofs in the film script for Ginseng: The Root of Life (1934)

    4.1. Margaret Bourke-White, Trade Winds (1929)

    4.2. Alexander Rodchenko, Soviet Automobile, Daesh’, no. 14 (1929)

    4.3. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family, A-I-Z, no. 38 (1931)

    4.4. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family, Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931).

    4.5. A. Gerdt, Prosperity, Ogonek, no. 3 (1936)

    4.6. El Lissitzky, Portrait by El Lissitzky, My Paris (1933)

    4.7. Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky, Parisian montage, My Paris (1933)

    4.8. Ilya Ehrenburg, Her Last Bench, My Paris (1933).

    4.9. Theirs… Ours: Homeless man in New York; seventeenth anniversary of October Revolution, celebratory demonstration on Red Square, Moscow, Sovetskoe foto, no. 8–9 (1934)

    4.10. Ilya Ilf, Americans, Ogonek, no. 13 (1936)

    4.11. Ilya Ilf, Roberts, Ogonek, no. 13 (1936)

    4.12. Ilya Ilf, Right here is America! Ogonek, no. 11 (1936)

    4.13. Ilya Ilf, Moscow, Ogonek, no. 12 (1936)

    4.14. Margaret Bourke-White, World’s Highest Standard of Living, or Ohio River Flood (1937)

    4.15. Unidentified artist, Ben Shahn photographing at the New Jersey Homesteads (ca. 1936–39)

    4.16. Ben Shahn, Scenes from the Living Theatre—Sidewalks of New York, New Theatre (1934)

    4.17. Ilya Ehrenburg, Belville, Prozhektor, no. 5 (1932)

    4.18. Ilya Ehrenburg The Eiffel Tower, My Paris (1933)

    4.19. Unattributed, [Anti-fascist] Rally in the Country, UHP: Spain (1936–37)

    4.20. Ilya Ehrenburg, We will defend the republic, No Pasaran! (1936–37)

    4.21. John Heartfield, Freedom itself struggles in its ranks (1936)

    4.22. Arkady Shaikhet, Uzbek-female worker from the Tashkent Textile Combine (1935)

    4.23. Walker Evans, Roadside View, Alabama Coal Area Company Town (1935)

    4.24. Robert Capa, untitled, laughing woman on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947)

    4.25. Robert Capa, untitled, rebuilding on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947)

    4.26. Robert Capa, untitled, man with family scrapbook, Stalingrad (1947)

    C.1. Gisèle Freund, "The editorial board of Mesures, at Henry Church’s villa in Ville d’Avray, April 1937"

    C.2. Gisèle Freund, Vladimir Nabokov, 1967

    C.3. Vladimir Nabokov family photographs

    C.4. The Nabokovs’ house on Morskaya Street, St. Petersburg, Speak, Memory (1966)

    C.5. "Nabokov and Dmitri in Mentone [sic]," Speak, Memory (1966)

    C.6. Vera and Dmitri Nabokov’s Nansen passport, Speak, Memory (1966)

    C.7. Nabokov with a butterfly net, from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1992)

    C.8. Photographs from The Story of One Reforging, The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934)

    C.9. Orchestra on the Canal, The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934)

    C.10. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Immediately upon Release, 1953 The Gulag Archipelago

    C.11. Camp portrait from the Kaluzhskaya outpost in Moscow, June 1946, The Gulag Archipelago

    Color Plates

    1. Retouched photograph from the White Sea Canal photographic archive (ca. 1930s)

    2. Lev Tolstoy, First Step (1908)

    3. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Lev Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (1908)

    4. A Day with Tolstoy, Solntse Rossii, no. 46 (1912)

    5. Leonid Andreev, Dacha in Vammelsuu (ca. 1910s)

    6. Leonid Andreev, From a color photograph, the work of L. Andreev, Solntse Rossii, no. 1 (1912)

    7. Leonid Andreev, Portrait of Judas (ca. 1910s)

    8. Leonid Andreev, dacha interior with Judas portrait (ca. 1910s)

    9. Leonid Andreev, stereographic view of the dacha grounds in Vammelsuu (ca. 1910s)

    10. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait with crucifix (ca. 1910s)

    11. Leonid Andreev, In Oilskin (ca. 1910s)

    12. Leonid Andreev, In the Office [Vadim] (ca. 1910s)

    13. Leonid Andreev, Savva (ca. 1910s)

    14. Leonid Andreev, Winter on the Sea (ca. 1910s)

    15. Leonid Andreev, double-exposed self-portrait (ca. 1910s)

    16. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Side View of the Kivach Waterfall [Suna River in Karelia] (1915)

    17. Cover for USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935)

    18. Mikhail Prishvin, A Typical Place for Woodsnipe and Head of a Woodsnipe, USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935)

    19. Mikhail Prishvin, details of sables, USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935)

    20. El and Es Lissitzky, The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR in Construction no. 9–12 (1937)

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    IN THE TEN YEARS THAT THIS BOOK HAS BEEN IN THE MAKING, I HAVE HAD the great good fortune to know the support of generous scholars and institutions alike. Research for this project was funded by grants from the University of Chicago Nicholson Center for British Studies, the University of Chicago Humanities Division and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and Princeton’s University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grants.

    I extend my deepest gratitude to the archivists and scholars who took an early and sustained interest in this project. I must thank in particular Richard Davies of the Leeds Russian Archive, whose scholarly generosity and knowledge of Leonid Andreev know no bounds; Harry Leich of the Library of Congress; Yana Grishina and Lilya Ryazanova at the Prishvin House Museum in Dunino; Boris Frezinsky; Margarita Pavlova; Roza Khruleva; and Aleksandra Ilf, who is greatly missed. And a warm thank you to every archivist and librarian who facilitated access to new materials and who offered guidance and help, including those at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and the New York Public Library Rare Books Collection; the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, DC); University of Chicago Special Collections; the Cotsen Library and Rare Books Collection at Princeton University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Hoover Institution (Stanford); the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy (Moscow); the Russian State Library (Moscow); the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI, Moscow); Pushkinskii dom (IRLI, St. Petersburg); and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, Moscow).

    This text has also benefited from the support and feedback of many readers, workshop participants, and conference events. Yuri Tsivian, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Bozena Shallcross, Joel Snyder, and Anna Lisa Crone at the University of Chicago gave encouragement, wisdom, and constructive objections. My never-ending thanks to the indefatigable Katie Duda, who saw through the first versions of this text, and to June Farris and Thomas Keenan for helping to solve so many reference and image conundrums along the way. I am grateful to have been the recipient of so many brilliant insights from the participants in kruzhki at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, as well as numerous rounds of AATSEEL and ASEEES (formerly AAASS) presentations and roundtables.

    In the process of revisions and manuscript preparation, this project was advanced by the generous feedback of John Mackay, Kevin Platt, and Andres Zervigon, as well as Molly Brunson, Penelope Burt, William Nickell, Kirill Ospovat, Elizabeth Papa-zian, Molly Thomasy-Blasing, Mikhail Velizhev, Emma Widdis, and Erika Wolf. My thanks for the support of my Princeton Slavic Department colleagues—Ellen Chances, Olga Hasty, Serguei Oushakine, and Ilya Vinitsky. I am indebted to the sharp editorial eyes of Caryl Emerson and Michael Wachtel. Should any errors or inaccuracies remain, I take full responsibility.

    I must also express my deepest gratitude to my mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert Bird. It was his first class on modern Russian literature that lit the spark that would become a career and launched the research questions that saw Photographic Literacy through from beginning to end. His generously enthusiastic support of not only this project but also my own scholarly development has made me the scholar that I am today.

    Thank you to my family—my always-understanding parents and patient in-laws and most especially my husband, Jon, and daughter, Margie—for making the room for this book to enter our lives.

    Portions of chapter 1 were previously printed in the following and used by permission: K. H. Reischl, Photography and the Crisis of Authorship: Tolstoy and the Popular Photographic Press, in Jahrbü cher fü r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 60, no. 4 (2012): 533–49.

    NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

    The terms, names, and locations in this work follow the spelling generally outlined by the Library of Congress, with exceptions for readability. For example, I have used the accepted spellings of proper names: Tolstoy, not Tolstoi; Prokudin-Gorsky, not Prokudin-Gorskii. Endnotes and bibliographic information citing Russian-language material follow the Library of Congress standard. I have sought out existing English translations wherever possible, making minor alterations for clarification as necessary. All other translations are my own.

    INTRODUCTION

    Chasing Pushkin’s Photograph

    Figure002.jpg

    Imagine—if Pushkin had lived another two or three years we would have had his photograph. Just one more step and he would have emerged from the night wherein he resides, rich in nuances and filled with picturesque implications, to stride firmly into the wan daylight that is now a whole century old…. Around 1840 photography—those scant square centimeters of light—marked the beginning of a visual era that has lasted to the present day, and which neither Byron, nor Pushkin, nor Goethe lived to see.

    VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible, 1937

    The first photograph, as is well known, appeared in Russia in the 1840s. Our great scientific achievements enabled us to produce photographs of Gogol, Chaadayev, and a few other of Pushkin’s contemporaries. But Pushkin himself, to our profound regret, did not have time to be photographed. What do we know objectively about the external appearance of the great poet? The iconography is extraordinarily meager and, perhaps, tells us more about the personalities of the portraitists than of the model…. We must correct this error of time!

    ANDREI BITOV, Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099), 1987

    WHAT IF WE HAD A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MOST CELEBRATED OF RUSSIAN AUTHORS, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837)? How would he be posed? What would we learn from the photographic likeness? For Vladimir Nabokov (through whose mobile imagination Pushkin’s authorial figure rides), a photograph of Pushkin from that era of sedentary photography would have caught the noble poet in the flat domestic light that guides us through the [nineteenth] century’s grayness. Trapped in the frame of a photograph, Pushkin would have been transformed into one of those latter-nineteenth century celebrities [who] assume the appearance of distant relatives—shabbily dressed, all in black as though they were in mourning for the iridescent life of yesteryear… against a background of dust-laden drapery.¹ In a fantastic reimagining of Nabokov’s ruminations, Andrei Bitov weaves his own tale, Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099) (Fotografiia Pushkina [1799–2099]), in the twentieth century, around Igor Odoevtsev’s quest to travel back from the future to capture a photographic representation of Pushkin, only to be foiled by the contingencies of time, space, and the distraction of knowing too much.²

    While the very structure and fabric of Bitov’s imagined future nation is founded on its power to subjugate time—a power also possessed by the photograph in its capture of the fleeting moment—the very impossibility of photographic capture is hinted at from the first pages of his story.³ The narrator, looking out of his own window (much as the figure of Pushkin did, we may assume, while penning The Bronze Horseman on a famous white night in St. Petersburg), asks us to look out the window alongside him:

    There’s no way to describe what was framed for me by someone who built this house long before I was around and who naturally did not think about planning the view from my window, but nonetheless sentenced me to this landscape. You couldn’t photograph it to catch the frame of the window—like the frame of a painting—and the fly crawling on the picture, and a pole in the foreground with wires like a music staff lining the landscape.

    Bitov’s text breaks down into a bewildering picture of fluid intermedial relationships, framing and unframing painting, music, and photography. The latter, of course, is most significant for our story. Foreshadowing the nearing crisis that our hero Igor will encounter, the narrator describes the inability to reconcile a past moment with a present one, despite the present’s dependence on the past. The two can never exist simultaneously in the contrived frame of an idealized picture.

    Despite such potential obstacles, the unnamed powers of a future Soviet society decree that these boundaries will be overcome. A photograph of Pushkin brought back from the past just in time for the three hundredth anniversary of his birth will display the state’s scientific and cultural superiority. While the chosen time- traveling hero should be ideologically minded (that is, in line with party ideals), two other practical issues are valued still more highly. The first is that whoever is sent must be able to photograph Pushkin, that is, to be photographically literate; but in the state’s most definitive proclamation, the person must also be able to UNDERSTAND.⁵ The hero must be a literary scholar—a PHILOLOGIST (spelled out in capital letters).⁶ But herein, we soon learn, also lies the problem. As a philologist, Igor is immediately caught up in the story of Pushkin’s life and its intertwining with the creation of his literary works. Thus, rather than seeing clearly enough to choose a moment to capture a legible photograph of the great author at work, he unintentionally captures with his camera lens senseless beauty (bessmyslennaia krasota), which is amplified (as Bitov’s narrator remarks) when seen in relation to the notes of the insane time traveler. At the end of the story the narrator lists the photographs that are developed in the future, evoking the fleeting details of Igor’s time-traveling encounters with Pushkin and highlighting moments from a literary life now offered in an abrupt, photographic code:

    The storm that preceded the cloud that had inspired the poet to write the line The last cloud dispersed by the storm…; the portrait of the cook Vasily slamming the door; the remarkable portrait of the rabbit in the snow—in a drift, ears erect, front paws folded under; the cart harnessed to the bullocks covered with the tarpaulin with Abreks prancing all around it; the hand with the candle and a piece of someone’s beard; the waves carrying coffins… and all the rest of the shots were of water and waves.

    Only once is a part of Pushkin inexpertly caught by Igor’s camera. The piece of someone’s beard is a fragmentary capture of Pushkin’s facial hair, which earlier in the story had startled Igor, accustomed to the iconic muttonchops from the portraits painted by Pushkin’s near contemporaries. Igor’s capture is thus doubly illegible: the photographic fragment is neither a fragment of the iconic image of Pushkin—one that might be immediately recognizable to the culturally literate viewer (e.g., see the fragmented muttonchops, fig. 0.1), nor is it the portrait of the unexpectedly fully bearded Pushkin that Igor alone has seen. Without the full proof, as it were, of this latter image, how could such an image of Pushkin be entered into the official record?

    In 1912, however, the art journal Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia) had already managed to print the photograph of Pushkin that so eluded Igor: the poet seated at his writing desk (fig. 0.2). As opposed to numerous painted and bronze monuments to the poet (by and large presenting the author in dashing aristocratic poses) or the ever-rushing figure of Pushkin in Bitov’s time-traveling text, the journal’s photograph frames Pushkin simply in the act of writing. Of course, in the case of the Solntse Rossii photograph, the Pushkin pictured is an impostor. But however anachronistic and dutiful this image might be, it is, for a brief moment, believable simply because it is a photograph. Our desire to see the real Pushkin, to partake of his aura and celebrity is—for a fleeting second—realized. We can now see a copy of his image, hold it in our hands, magnify it, get as close to it as we physically can. Such an imagined interaction recalls, even in the paradoxical use of aura, Walter Benjamin’s characterization of photography’s power to fulfill our desire to "get closer to things—that is, the very means by which aura decays.⁸ While photographic reproducibility (for Benjamin) overcomes the work of art’s uniqueness and authenticity, in the case of the author’s image, imbued as it might be with our (the misguided philologist’s or the naive reader’s) whole image of literature, it allows the viewer to get closer to the author himself by proxy. In Roland Barthes’s terms, this image of literature is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions."⁹ Certainly in the Russian tradition, from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn, the author not only has served as political and social commentator but, as such, has held a more celebrated position in mass culture even than in the West. And while the formalists would reject the privileging of authorial biography in literary study (decades before Barthes), the figure of the author as celebrity would continue to have considerable hold throughout the twentieth century. Here, with the photograph of our Pushkin, centered on the page as in our cultural imagination, we can reach out and touch (literally) the material manifestation—the photograph—of his unique celebrity.

    Figure 0.1. “Pushkin, a beard fragment,” made by the author from “Double of A. S. Pushkin,” Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

    Figure 0.1. Pushkin, a beard fragment, made by the author from Double of A. S. Pushkin, Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

    Figure 0.2. “Double of A. S. Pushkin” (“Dvoinik A. S. Pushkina”), Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

    Figure 0.2. Double of A. S. Pushkin (Dvoinik A. S. Pushkina), Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

    But the problem of uniqueness is immediately undermined, as the caption (Pushkin’s Double) of the photograph in Solntse Rossii reminds us. As it turns out, the caption and the impossible photograph present to us the very antithesis of what we desire: an image with no value except in the readerly satisfaction at the unveiling of an obvious (but impressive) impostor—or simply put, a simulacrum. Pushkin’s untimely death saved the poet from the confines of what Nabokov might deem the inauthenticity of the photograph and any photographically enabled virtual proximity; it also saved him from the incursion of the new realistic mode of literary representation that arose along with photography in the 1840s. The poet remains forever sheltered from the magnified mimeticism of the camera’s lens and its flattening effect on the luminary literary persona, as represented in Nabokov’s imagination. Pushkin’s figure, not to be relegated to the mere status of celebrity, offers an as yet still intact synthesis of a historical figure, authorial mythos, and the sum of his literary output.

    The case of Pushkin, from Nabokov to Bitov, illustrates well the compound tension of the literary sphere in the age of the photograph: the conflation of author and text, enabled by the photograph’s mechanical reproducibility, and the challenge mounted by photography against the literary notion of subjectivity. For the camera apparatus casts new doubt on the creative agency of the artist, shifting the relationship between artist and world.¹⁰ Some early texts in the West even attributed authorship in photography not to the person taking the picture but to the sun itself.¹¹ The Russian calque for photography, svetopis′ (light writing), which coexisted for a time alongside the Greek-based fotografiia in the first decades following the technology’s introduction to Russia, further obscured the role of authorship in image production. Can the photographer be an active agent in the production of an image that is actually written in light? If the camera is the active agent in image production, what role does the photographer really play?

    Photography was perceived as a challenge—not only to painting and literature but to the very integrity of the self. In the nineteenth century this challenge resonated across the literary landscape. Fyodor Dostoevsky treated photographic realism with distrust and anxiety. As a critical and rhetorical move, he accused Nikolai Uspensky of indiscriminately picturing everything with his photographic machine.¹² In The Idiot (1868), a photograph of Nastasya Filippovna served as a proxy for her introduction to Prince Myshkin, providing a perfect likeness of the character, thus beginning, and perhaps even foreshadowing, a relationship that ends in destruction. A photograph also has a fleeting though important role in The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875), in which the narrator muses, It’s extremely rare that photographic copies bear any resemblance to the original…. An artist studies a face and divines its main feature… a photograph finds the man as he is.¹³ Such a judgment on the truth of photographic capture relegates the medium to the status of a banal foil for a true wholeness of seeing. And while these ekphrastic transformations in the pages of one of the great authors of Russian prose assert the dominance of text over the objectifying potential of photography, they speak directly to photography’s challenge to notions of authorship, creativity, and truth. How do authors transform their authorial practice when they take up the camera? When and how do authors become photographically literate? How does this new mode of seeing shape the literary landscape? I pose these questions in relation to the photographic life of Russian literature in full recognition that they ultimately spring from meditating on an absent page: the impossible, and now overexposed, photograph of Alexander Pushkin (fig. 0.3).

    Figure 0.3. “Overexposed Pushkin,” made by the author from “Double of A.S. Pushkin,” Solntse Rossii, no.6 (1912).

    Figure 0.3. Overexposed Pushkin, made by the author from Double of A.S. Pushkin, Solntse Rossii, no.6 (1912).

    Developing Photographic Literacy

    If the camera apparatus was greeted with skepticism by nineteenth-century writers, the twentieth century welcomed it with a warm embrace. In 1926, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment during the most open period of Soviet artistic expression, linked a vision of the new nation with photographic literacy, stating, Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera. This will surely happen with time. Just as the USSR achieved universal literacy in general, so too will it have photographic literacy in particular.¹⁴ For Lunacharsky, Soviet citizens en masse would now have access to portable means of organizing both time (the watch) and space (the camera). Working in parallel with the early Soviet movement to make every reader a writer, this democratically empowering call would inspire the worker photography movement, a burgeoning number of author-photographers, and well-known avant-garde artists to employ the camera in their own framings of a volatile Soviet experience.¹⁵ Just two years later, Hungarian modernist László Moholy-Nagy published his own prophetic vision of photographic literacy: "First must come the realization that the knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen"¹⁶ (fig. 0.4). While each man’s decree addressed different spheres of readership in different national contexts (for Lunacharsky, the readers of the new photography journal Sovetskoe foto; for Moholy-Nagy, the arts journal Bauhaus 2), each imagined a not so distant future when photography would be as ubiquitous and necessary as the printed word. Here, photographic literacy would reach its apogee as a focal point for wider interests in visual perception and representation—for both the everyday citizen of every forward-looking country and the artist working in any medium.

    Figure 0.4. Alexander Rodchenko, cover for Zhurnalist, no. 3 (1930). Image courtesy of Columbia University Library. Art © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

    Figure 0.4. Alexander Rodchenko, cover for Zhurnalist, no. 3 (1930). Image courtesy of Columbia University Library. Art © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

    Such an embrace of the camera’s potentially objectifying capture might serve as one illustration of Marshall Berman’s wide-reaching definition of modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.¹⁷ Read along Berman’s lines, the camera as an object itself of modernization, wielded by the modern subject, makes in its capture both an object and a new subject(ivity) in the frames of the photograph. This expert wielding of the apparatus might, as in the vision of Lunacharsky, form a defining feature of a new subjecthood in the modern world: the photographer. However, the collapse of object and subject, founded on the complete adoption of a camera mode, forms the foundation for the film critic André Bazin’s claim that with the camera, for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.¹⁸ It is precisely this kind of assumption that encouraged the embrace of the camera in the Soviet era and that so struck Walter Benjamin in Sergei Tretyakov’s images of life in the Soviet Union. Benjamin saw the unconscious component in photographic production as eliminating the long-since-counterfeit wealth of creative personality that he viewed as inherent to the bourgeois notion of artistic creation.¹⁹ At the height of the factographic movement in Russia in the early 1930s, the camera apparatus, understood as an objective means of fixing fact, was taken up by Tretyakov and new photo-reporters such as Max Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet not only for documenting a rapidly changing Soviet reality but also for shaping that very reality by an objective means.²⁰

    This book will explore how that shaping of reality was framed by both image and text. As Jefferson Hunter notes,

    Somewhere in the vicinity of every photograph there is a hand holding a pen…. The hand may be at a distance, but it is there. It is closest to the image, literally, in published works combining photographs with text, in all the forms this combination may take: ordinary printed book with photographic illustrations; photographic album with explanatory, technical, or expressive captions; photo essay in [a] magazine; catalogue of an exhibition; screenplay published with stills; photojournalistic compilation; [etc.].²¹

    At the heart of nearly all of these printed forms in our Russian context was the figure of the author-photographer. Not coincidentally, this hybrid category, for a producer working in hybrid modes, arose in the Soviet period largely through Sergei Tretyakov, who would state in 1934, the year that socialist realism became doctrine, I do not know what would be more difficult for me in traveling as a writer, if I were to lose my pen and notebook or my camera.²² And while the author-photographer movement would reach its apex in the mid-1930s, its traceable lineage begins in the prerevolutionary period, through authors as diverse as Leonid Andreev, Maximilian Voloshin, and Mikhail Prishvin, followed in the Soviet period by Ilya Ehrenburg and Ilya Ilf, all of whom will be discussed in detail in the following chapters.

    With the exception of the oft-mentioned Sergei Tretyakov, the author-photographer was not necessarily situated at the cutting edge of the art movements of the day, but each actively struggled with the dominant modes of representation. Consequently, author-photographer suggests a unique picture of the way in which subjectivity is shaped in artistic production. The framing of the authorial subject was sometimes as explicit as a self-portrait but could also take on other more mediated forms, such as the delineation of a home within the frame of the photograph (Rozanov) or a micro-geographical rendering of a familiar place (Prishvin). And particularly in the Soviet period, the author-photographer’s appropriation of the dominant avant-garde mode of artistic production exposed tensions underlying the creation and self-creation of the Soviet author and subject. These authors demonstrate how an authorial subject under creative duress can reassert his own framing of an individual subjectivity through the hybrid intersections of text and image. And it is in these framings of the self within the photograph—formal, textual, contextual—that the author-photographer learns to transform the seemingly objective medium of photography into a medium of self-representation and to master photographic literacy.

    The Frame

    This book considers the interactions between photography and literary writing over roughly seventy years, with most of the attention devoted to the case of the hybrid author-photographer, treated in greatest detail in chapters 2 through 4. The author-photographer is also uniquely situated as the subject of our study, involved as he was in the various fields of intermediality, mediation, and remediation. For artists who were and continued to be writers first and foremost, photography emerged in each case as a medium to work with (i.e., text plus image) within those various fields. And as Irina O. Rajewsky notes, in the larger historical trajectories of media in their ever-evolving forms, earlier media, including painting, literature, photography, and film, have frequently remediated (and continue to remediate) both the respective newer media as well as one another.²³ The shape of this remediation will provide the space in which to explore how image might be remediated in and through text (as ekphrasis, photographic practice in parallel with literary, or illustration), as well as the ways in which text is remediated in the already established spaces of image culture.

    Here, too, boundaries become an essential site of investigation. Boundaries take on many forms in this study, including permeable national borders, the thin line between life and death, that between literary subject and author, and most important, the frame. If we revert to a strictly literary definition, Mary Caws’s seminal work on the literary frame describes the framing look as one that cuts out, concentrates upon, and centers on whatever is to be emphasized, by a decoupage or circumscription—writing around and about, cutting and cropping—all of which exemplify a technique of limiting with positive aims.²⁴ Furthermore, the framed object—ekphrastically rendered—can serve as a visual focal point: a portrait, a photograph, or a painting, which may itself become the developing or revealing object for the import of the entire scene narrated, as it were, by condensation.²⁵ Not unlike the literal, material frame marking out a canvas on the gallery wall, the framed passage marks value for those conversant in literary form. Frames, in all their forms, focus attention on the singularity of a self-contained picture; the frame serves to arrest our attention by setting its picture apart from its environment while at the same time forming a key, representative part of those very surroundings.

    But a photograph can be framed in a variety of ways. Framing a scene in the viewfinder of a camera represents the initial selection (of what arrests our attention) in the creation of the photograph itself. The resulting photograph, should the photographer herself be as photographically literate as the writer, will capture that picture once framed in the eye or viewfinder on the photograph’s flat plane. But should a successful photograph be produced (with legible subjects in focus, neither over-nor underexposed), the photograph will still present an interpretative challenge to its reader/viewer, precisely because it is framed and because of the ways in which those frames might shift, materially, textually, or contextually.²⁶ Sergei Tretyakov formulated this problem as the inherent flaw of the photograph: The snapshot has its own internal flaw: the uniqueness and contingency of what it depicts…. As a rule snapshots are contingent. In order to provide the contingent gesture, expression, and action with the weight and significance of generality, it is necessary to enhance the moment either quantitatively or qualitatively.²⁷ For Tretyakov, along with his fellow author-photographers, this enhancement would be provided by the frame of the authorial text. As John Tagg reminds us,

    Historians of images have learned well enough how the law of the frame touches them: image or context, that is the choice…. Viewer, image, context— held together and apart, clamped in place by an apparatus…. The apparatus is not entirely stable and does not always work. When it does, it falls short or goes too far. And there is always the chance it will be interrupted, unsettled, undermined, sabotaged, or even smashed.²⁸

    Photographs, despite their surfeit of objectivity and clarity, can as easily offer too little. The viewing of pictures, and of photographs in particular, encompasses not only phenomenological perception, as Meyer writes, but also an interpretation that is socially and culturally informed.²⁹ What we see within the literary sphere is photography’s adaptability, its assimilation into that sphere, while also marking at times its illegibility—the irreducible homogeneity as the apparatus (both image capture and structures of reading) breaks down.³⁰

    Especially in the Soviet context, the viewer must be aware (as the author-photographers themselves were) that (new) framing could

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